Pages and Miles

I have been writing this post in my head over and over for
about a week now. Put the words down on the screen was a huge step and now
posting them here is another huge step. But here it goes.

Mornings might be best for coffee and contemplation, but the
dark and the stars and the sound of the ocean is altogether the right thing for
self-reflection and a personal get right with yourself talk.

This site has laid dormant for years now mostly because I
have too. I feel like I, and therefore the name of the site, are fraudulent. I
am still WVRed but I have not been a reader nor a runner, not consistently,
since my 2015 injury. The longer it has been the more I have avoided coming
here.

At first, I blamed my injury but I recovered from that and
after a few false starts, trying to jump back into where I had been instead of where I actually was, I could have
returned to running but I didn’t. More interesting and probably a sign I should
have been paying a lot of attention to was the lack of reading that came along
with the lack of running.

So sitting on the deck in the Spring cold watching the stars
and listening to the waves (the beach and ocean are where I am meant to be I am
convinced), I thought a lot about where I am and how I got back to the place I
was in 2014 when everything was also awful and I was so very miserable with
myself before I found that running made me better, stronger and put me in an
emotionally better place.

It was then that the magnitude of all that has happened in
the past 3 years came crashing in. I have seen major friendship changes. I have
watched people dear to me go through some horrible life circumstances which
were beyond my control to help fix. I started working, first part-time and then
full-time. My family has radically altered. First, with my eldest graduating
and leaving for college which came with some added challenges for her. And then
this past year when my husband left to go stay mostly with his father who has
been ill making me suddenly, for the most part, a single parent 80% of the
time. The changing dynamic of parenting teens and young adults is exhausting in
a totally different way. Toddlers leave you drained at the end of the day but
the emotional work of young people is bone numbingly tiring. Do not get me
wrong I would not trade it for the world. I have a teen who talks to me (and a
young adult who does not but who I know has someone she does talk to) and I
would not trade that. But it is exhausting.

Couple all of that with what I have come to see more and
more clearly as SAD coupled with insomnia which really breaks me every
Feb/March. This year I felt very much like I was in it alone. The time or two I
tried to broach the subject with people close to me I felt dismissed. That
triggered a bunch of walls and historically poor responses many of which are
both physically and emotionally unhealthy.

Sitting there I realized that emotional eating (ALL THE
CARBS), not sleeping, and generally taking care of everyone else but me was
what got me to where I was in 2014 and it was exactly what got me back to
almost the same spot in 2018. The other realization I had was in recognizing
that it was not just that I was not running and not just that I was not
reading. It was that I was trying to get back to being the person I was in
2015/2016. And she does not exist anymore. I can’t go back I have to start
over. I get to keep the parts of the old me that I liked and build on that. I
have to remember that the average time to build a house is 7 months and I am
not building just any house I am building a cathedral. Those MFers took
centuries.

I have archived everything here. I have come up with new
logos that are grayed out and as things progress they will colorize. My first
goal is figuring out what that progress will look like. I have decided I don’t
care if I monetize, have followers, get free stuff, become an ambassador to any
brand or ever move beyond posting stupid memes and progress reports. There is
no schedule, no daily themes and no pressure.

This is 100% my building plan and I am laying the groundwork
for a new me.